Dataset Information

Household Labor Supply and the Gains from Social Insurance.

ABSTRACT: The marginal gains from social income insurance programs are captured by the gap in the marginal utility of consumption across states of nature. To identify this gap in the context of the household, this paper offers a new labor-supply based approach that leverages household-level economic interactions and optimality conditions. We demonstrate that, in frameworks of efficient household allocations, spousal labor supply responses to shocks have direct implications for the gains from more generous government benefits to households. We show that this holds for both intensive and extensive margin responses under fairly general conditions. Our analysis illustrates how labor market data can be used for assessing marginal welfare gains in a general class of social insurance schemes, including the large and important programs of disability insurance and survivors benefits. Hence, household labor supply behavior and responses to shocks, which are widely studied in theoretical and empirical work, hold valuable information for the optimal design of social insurance.

SUBMITTER: Fadlon I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6703837 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Household Labor Supply and the Gains from Social Insurance.

Fadlon Itzik I Nielsen Torben Heien TH

Journal of public economics 20180202

The marginal gains from social income insurance programs are captured by the gap in the marginal utility of consumption across states of nature. To identify this gap in the context of the household, this paper offers a new labor-supply based approach that leverages household-level economic interactions and optimality conditions. We demonstrate that, in frameworks of efficient household allocations, spousal labor supply responses to shocks have direct implications for the gains from more generous ...[more]

PMID: 31435079

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundSouth Africa has a dual system of healthcare model differentiated across socio-economic lines. While on the one hand there exists high quality private facilities that is expensive and accessible to the minority, on the other is the free but stretched and over-crowded public healthcare that the rest of the population relies on. Accessing private facilities requires private medical insurance or requires coping strategies that can lead to household vulnerability.ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to analyse the relationship between health shocks and household vulnerability in the South African context of high poverty and low medical insurance penetration rate.DataThe study employs data from waves three to five of South Africa's nationally representative National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) conducted between the period 2012-2017 in approximately two-year intervals.MethodsUsing food expenditure shock as an indicator for vulnerability, the study utilises a range of econometric techniques from panel logit regression to quasi-experimental design based difference in difference regressions to assess the association between health shocks, medical insurance and household vulnerability.FindingsThe main finding of the study is that a significant proportion of households in the upper income quintile utilise private healthcare even when not covered by private medical insurance. This preference for private over public health facilities make them vulnerable to health shocks as they cope by sacrificing food consumption to incur additional health expenditure. In contrast, lower income households that are unable to access the high-cost private healthcare tend to rely on the strained public healthcare system. They are not able to use their constrained food expenditure as a coping strategy for private or out-of-pocket medical expenses because their food consumption is already at a bare minimum.ConclusionThe results confirm that access to quality healthcare is a privilege in South Africa, available only to the minority of the population. The study paints a grim picture of household vulnerability in South Africa and underlines the need for a National Health Insurance that would enable universal access to quality healthcare in the country.

Dataset Information

Household Labor Supply and the Gains from Social Insurance.

Publications

Household Labor Supply and the Gains from Social Insurance.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets